How Long Is The Yzerplan Supposed To Take, Anyway?

If Detroit Red Wings fans aren’t allowed to full-throatedly moan about their misfortune quite yet, I think one more missed playoffs should do the trick. Yes, this franchise collected four Stanley Cups while icing an army of Hall of Famers from 1997 to 2008. But after the team’s 25-year postseason appearance streak burned out in 2017, their fans were forced on an express bus to craptown. The Wings haven’t won a playoff series since 2013. They haven’t earned a chance to win one since 2016. In both categories, only the Sabres can boast a longer active drought. And if you’re sitting that close to the Sabres, whose fans deserve to gripe more than any other, all the banners in the world won’t make you immune to the stink.

In Detroit, the hopes for a turnaround rest not with an active player, like Bedard in Chicago or Celebrini in San Jose, but with one of most beloved legends in team history, now wearing a suit. Former captain Steve Yzerman, after an impeccable job building up the borderline dynastic Tampa Bay Lightning, returned to his adoptive home to take over as GM in 2019, replacing in his long-tenured predecessor Ken Holland a man who had failed to adapt to the ways of the salary cap era. Yzerman’s first year on the job, before it was cut short by the pandemic, saw a depleted Wings roster produce one of the all-time terrible NHL seasons. He was not to blame for this. He had inherited a team that had basically been out of the draft lottery for two-and-a-half decades, whose old workarounds of “paying lots of money to awesome veterans” and “bringing over young European virtuosos” were all but eliminated by the introduction of the cap and league-wide advances in scouting, respectively.

The arrival of two talented rookies in Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider in 2021 raised the Red Wings at least to mediocre. But that’s where they’ve plateaued. Last season, in which they hung on in the race for the eighth seed until the bitter end, was the most exciting season of the Yzerman era yet—not really an endorsement, all told.

There are two ways to look at it. One is that each year has been a little less depressing than the one that came before. The other is that the team has remained basically irrelevant for the longest stretch since before Yzerman was drafted. I was lucky enough to be at the regular-season win that closed down Joe Louis Arena back in 2017, the regret at the end of the playoff streak superseded by the joy of celebrating an era of championships (with an absurd number of flying octopuses). That the Wings needed to take a break and retool was an inevitability. But if you asked fans at that game where they wanted to see the team in seven years, “losing a fight for an eight seed to the shit-ass Washington Capitals” wouldn’t have made the list.

No matter if the glass is half-empty or half-full, all fans can agree on one thing: The Red Wings need to get better. This is simple math. If you don’t rack up enough points in a given season to make the playoffs, you have to figure out a way to add more in the next. But after the interest piqued by last spring, the sense that the Wings are maybe just a couple steps away from contention is dampened by what they’ve done, or failed to do, this offseason. Here, crudely charted, are the moves the Red Wings have made with NHL-level skaters so far this summer, with each player’s point total from last year listed beside them.

On the page, it’s terribly underwhelming—a step back from a place that was already insufficient. But there are some caveats. Detroit’s injury-plagued goaltending situation from last year figures to be better, even if they hadn’t also signed Cam Talbot. Their offseason focus was (and remains) locking up current restricted free agents Raymond and Seider, and the lingering uncertainty about those contracts inhibits some bigger swings. And there’s still talent in the pipeline, including first-rounders Simon Edvinsson and Marco Kasper, who are expected to contribute before long. But even Yzerman himself, in comments to the media earlier this month, had no interest in claiming he’d made the Red Wings into any more of a short-term threat.

“I don’t think it’s any different than I felt last year,” he said. “I think we’re in with that group of teams that has a chance to compete for the playoffs. If we stay healthy, if our goaltending is good, and you get some maybe unexpected — some players outplay your expectation — we might get in. Or you might just miss by a point on the last game of the season. That’s the fine line of it all.”

The New York Times

It’s disheartening to start the year already knowing that, once again, the Wings won’t consider it a failure if they miss the playoffs. There’s no urgency, no desire to take a chance and go for it. In my wildest dreams, they’d pull the practically unprecedented move of offersheeting an RFA like Marty Nečas or Matty Beniers, but they won’t even take a mild risk. Despite enjoying some breathing room below the cap, the Wings’ top free-agent signings ranked 27th and 37th among the summer’s richest UFA deals. Ranked 26th and 30th were two guys they lost. They’ve still got about $20 million in space to play with, before the Raymond and Seider deals, but as it stands they’re relying a lot on player development to make up the difference of the on-paper losses.

This is all of a piece with Yzerman’s long-term strategy up to this point, which has been to keep picks, draft patiently, avoid big contracts, and rearrange middling veterans on top of the few obvious building blocks Detroit has. While some might argue there’s virtue in being a tortoise, a post this week from the Vancouver Canucks, honoring 105-year-old fan Dorothy Palmer, reminded me that there’s weight to every year, whether teams feel it or not.

I’m sorry to be morbid, but Dorothy is probably going to die without ever seeing the Canucks win a Stanley Cup. The Red Wings, with their history, aren’t facing down anything quite this dark, but it’s worth remembering that there’s a finite amount of time we have on this Earth to enjoy hockey. A star like Dylan Larkin has an even more limited chance to make his career count. Yzerman, fairly secure in his job, doesn’t need to treat every season like it’s his last. But for some, it is. The clock’s always ticking.